Little Death
by sigmalied
Summary: After the events on Rannoch, Shepard's too tired to pretend that she doesn't like it when Liara takes it upon herself to orchestrate their bedroom activities.


_**A/N**: One of those guilty pleasure sort of things. Default Shepard._

* * *

She felt a hand on the back of her head with fingers securely woven into her hair, and she yielded when she felt pressure being applied. With a calm exhale she allowed herself to be pushed down until her cheek met the sheets and her arms were curled beneath her chest. The survival instincts concretely installed within every cell in her body were warning her that this was not an advantageous position at all. She was vulnerable. Her back was bare, the delicate base of her skull was exposed, her vision was restricted from viewing her captor, and her hands and legs were rendered useless beneath the weight of her fetal-like position. Despite the primal regions of her brain objecting in fear for her safety, Shepard remained still with a slight glaze over her eyes.

"I can't believe you did that."

The firm grip on her hair tightened."Mmm… Can't believe what?" Shepard's hum melted into low, sultry words. She felt a cool kiss being placed on the base of her neck and essentially purred.

"That you faced that Reaper alone, and made us watch helplessly. And I what I can't believe more is that you escaped with only a few scratches."

More kisses were placed along her spine, her shoulder blades, and back up to the side of her neck. She could feel the warmth of another body leaning over her, and the texture of smooth fabric against her back. The sight of her cabin disrupted when her eyelids fluttered at the hard kiss that captured her pulse, and she allowed a small sound to escape her throat. It dissipated into a few shallow pants. "Well, you know," she said with a bit of breathless strain, "sometimes enough is enough. You have to take a stand. We needed Rannoch."

Liara withdrew from her neck, lips brushing against pieces of red hair that spilled from the secure hold of her fingers. They smelled like smoke and sweat. Beneath her, Shepard's body was rising and falling; Liara could feel her ribs gently brushing against the inside of her thighs every so often as they expanded with the breaths drawn into her lungs.

"Are you angry with me?" the Commander inquired, but in a tone that held no real fear toward the notion of it possibly being true.

"No. Of course not." Liara released her head and began gently rubbing the muscles in her neck and shoulders. "You did a great thing; an amazing thing. Why? Did you want me to be angry with you?" she asked with amusement.

"Maybe a little," Shepard quietly confessed, her voice dreamy and lustful. "I like it when you're rough with me."

Liara flushed, withdrawing her hands as if she had burned them. After her momentary flustered state had passed, she playfully shoved Shepard's head back down a few inches so her cheek connected with the mattress once again; a punishment for catching her by surprise.

"Yeah, just like that," Shepard muttered against the sheets with a smile.

Above, from where she straddled Shepard with her knees pressed into the bed on either side of the Commander's body, Liara pressed her thumbs back into her stiff trapezius muscles before lowering her head. "Stretch your legs out," she said against her temple while deciding to acquiesce to her desires.

Shepard obeyed and cast Liara a provocative glance before relaxing her limbs and compliantly remaining still while the asari pinned her weary body underneath herself. She kissed her neck once before shifting over her shoulder to meet her gaze. With half-lidded eyes Shepard reached over, ignoring the slight strain in her neck to request a kiss, and was given one.

"How do you feel?" Liara asked her, their noses nearly touching.

Shepard gave her a look which conveyed that her answer was quite obvious.

"I mean health-wise."

"Tired, sore. But okay. Doesn't matter," Shepard leaned in once more. Numerous short kisses were followed by longer, lingering ones.

The asari placed a final kiss against her lips before speaking. "Lift your hips."

Shepard complied yet again, transferring a bit of weight onto bent knees to elevate her lower body. The tiny sounds of metal latches being undone reached her ears; it was followed by a tug and the noise that came from the belt swiftly running against the material of her pants as it was pulled from its loops.

"If you keep letting me order you around like this I may not take you as seriously outside the bedroom, you know," Liara smoothly drawled while coiling the belt. She set it aside.

A small laugh rose from Shepard. "Well I'll just order you around next time to make up for it." She twitched at the sensation of a hand pushing into the front of her pants, accompanied by an affectionate kiss being pressed to her shoulder.

"What would you like me to do?" Liara asked her.

She reached back with one hand to briefly run her fingertips against the line of her jaw. "Touch me."

"How?"

"However you want, just please…" Shepard parted her knees and arched at what followed, giving a small, shuddering blend of a whimper and a sigh as she accepted the intrusion.

Liara paused. "Don't you want me to remove your pants first? Or are you beyond caring about the romance?"

A weak and exasperated cry escaped Shepard. "I don't care, stop teasing me. I know you're doing it on purpose…" She could practically feel the smile on Liara's lips as she continued to kiss her shoulders, soon moving to the crook of her neck.

"Maybe I am angry at you," Liara simply stated against her skin. "Maybe I'm upset that you constantly pull stunts like that while leaving us in the dark, or otherwise useless. Yes, you do all these reckless things for the good of others, and you should be commended for that and encouraged to continue doing those things, and while I am extraordinarily proud of you… it still frustrates me to no end. So instead of letting that frustration manifest during critical moments, perhaps it would be best to address it here."

"You're an awful,dreadful –_ ohh_, I love you…"

"I'm going to go slow," she softly told Shepard, ignoring her sobbing sound of protest, "And I'm going to talk to you about something."

"I take it back, I don't love you anymore – _oh god_, okay, okay… yes I do, I still love you. I'll listen, just do that again…"

The scent of fire filled Liara's nose once more when she bent down to kiss the back of her head. Contrary to what the Commander must have thought, she was not torturing Shepard without good reason; not only did she want to hear her name on a pleading, raspy voice at some point, but she was also confident that the longer she could draw it out, the more beautifully Shepard would eventually writhe. Shepard would thank her later, and apologize with zeal for ever calling her dreadful. But for now, Liara needed a way to occupy herself while taking her time so that she did not yield to Shepard's impulsive desires. She would talk to her though the inevitable objections instead; fill the air with words to dampen the fever. Liara spoke gently against her ear. "Have you ever wondered why asari are receptive to intimate practices, when we reproduce only through melds?"

"Liara…"

"In the simplest terms," she said, "the reason is empathy. Even without a complete meld, our peripheral nervous systems are able to establish… micro-melds, if you will, with the neurons in the epidermis of our partners. When skin touches, neurons in close proximity create temporary synapses. And then, our bodies express a rudimentary reflection of erogenous zones that were read from the partner. We empathize. We acquire the fondness of being touched in the same way that our partner does, and after each successive encounter with the same partner, the more the nerves in our bodies begin to change and adapt to resemble theirs. Our bodies _learn_ the desire to be touched."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

Liara pressed down onto her, consequently imprisoning her own hand and most of her forearm beneath their combined weight. It would only be for a minute; she was nearly done tormenting the poor woman, but for now she would restrain her from thrashing too much. "And if our sexual partners change, our nervous systems can re-learn a new map of erogenous zones. When two asari mate, they empathize with whatever their partner's body had previously learned. This may bring up the question of mating rituals before contact with other species, but most historical records and ancient art have not explicitly yielded anything as… bodily intimate as in our culture today. It seems that the ecstasy experienced through a mating meld was pleasurable enough by itself, most of the time. And the plasticity of our nervous system is likely the reason why we live such long lives; the ability of a cell to undergo electrochemical transformation without the alteration of DNA is very indicative of naturally long-lived cells."

"Liara, please… You used to be so sweet to me… Now you're just cruel…" her words trailed off into a long groan that suddenly ended in a grateful, blissful note painted with the realization that the torture was over. She began to arch with her fingers curling around fistfuls of sheets.

What curious sounds the human made; over the years Liara had heard her make a wide range of vocalizations, from guttural shouts and pained near-screams, to laughter (though rarely, as she was all about sarcasm and dry humor with little light-hearted joy to be found); they had their places, mainly during times of war and crisis. But the sounds that were spilling from her vocal chords now were unique and exclusive to the situation. They were long and passion-filled – sometimes short and high-pitched – and comprised of such a different variety of emotions that it was hard to believe that sounds as these, and sounds that were heard in the midst of battle, could all be produced by the same woman.

Though Shepard was still the same as she'd ever been, if except in voice. Even beneath her – writhing – she was powerful and commanding. She was tempered in battle, yet raw in bed; and she was utterly unafraid on both fronts. She expressed no bashfulness, no shame in reciting her intimate fantasies, and no relinquishment of pride nor authority when she had allowed herself to be bent over. She had requested and permitted this because she had _wanted_ it, and not a single waver in all her dignity was to be found even for a moment during her submission. She _got off_ when they were like this. That was all that mattered. And now, she bade Liara to anchor her fingers into her hair again, and perhaps pull; and Liara did so while rolling her hips into her and steadily guiding their bodies through the continuing motions.

"What do you want me to do, babe…?" Shepard breathlessly asked her in a rich, aroused voice from where she rested her head on one cheek. "Tell me what to do, Liara..."

Liara cast her eyes downward, catching the curve in her brow and the slight parting of her lips that would have normally been attributed to pain, and the way she heatedly gazed back at her. "Keep saying that for me," she said, clenching the hand that was fastened around red locks of hair, then hooked her thumb down to gently rub the small bump of the vertebrae in her neck.

"Liara."

Her breath caught in her throat as the silky rendition of her name reached her. "Yes, say that for me." A flood of affection and appreciation swept through her chest when she heard her name rising on her voice; oh, she_ loved_ her. She loved the way she was so aware of them both, how she appealed to her with sounds and actions she _knew _she liked, and how she accommodated her ministrations by arching and placing her knees _just right_ to receive what she craved of her. She loved looking at her lithe back, watching her shoulder blades move beneath lightly-freckled skin while disheveled strands of stray hair fell into her face and touched her lips, occasionally being sent away on the breath of a ragged sigh. And watching her was only enkindling an erotic burning deep within Liara.

From the corner of her eye, Shepard could see her glossy black eyes clouding into an impossibly dark shade of coal that devoured the dim light of the cabin. The way her irises quivered within their depths made her tremble with anticipation; Liara had eyes like death – a void – something she was programmed to fear. In a sense, the meld truly was a little dream of death. A temporary destruction of the _self_, and a miniature introduction to what would become of her after; a part of something else, living on for an eternity through the bodies of other organisms. Liara sought to die with her for a little moment, to obliterate them both just to become a single mind for only a few seconds.

And she was so _quiet_, even with annihilation glistening in her eyes. But she was always quiet. She was quiet when bleeding, quiet when angry, quiet when happy; it was impossible to know the wide universe she withheld behind faint smiles and blank, analytical gazes. In her silence, Shepard was feeling a ravenous hunger against the borders of her mind, though she also felt a strange tentativeness, as if Liara were struggling to hold back but was becoming overwhelmed by her own desires to dismantle their consciences and braid them tightly together. A warm darkness was beginning to enter her head like water seeping into soil. She did not resist, but extended her thoughts out to her, grabbing onto the splintered edges of the other mind and sewing them together with her own.

Shepard twisted her fistfuls of sheets, digging her fingernails into their material as she felt the adoration emanating from Liara engulf her. In only a few moments, she could no longer remember which of them she was. There were two visages, both of which were entangled yet clear. Enamored vocalizations were filling the air, there was an aching wrist, and a handful of something silky. There were shudders and staggered breaths that carried them through a white threshold barren of sense. The nothingness was comforting and filled with pleasure, though as it faded, so did the endless reflections of each other's nervous systems. A subtle repositioning of their bodies followed, and they found themselves looking at one another while their individual thoughts were resurrected from the dead and refilled the disorganized interiors of their skulls. From behind a choppy curtain of disorderly segments of hair, Shepard watched the inky depths in Liara's eyes dissipate, chest heaving, and nearly mourned as the hall of mirrors created between their shared gazes melted back into that plane of oblivion where their minds had met.


End file.
